politics, theory, action

Posts categorized "Zizek"

August 16, 2015

At times Zizek suggests that it's better to do nothing. This doing nothing resonates with a certain passivity, perhaps better described as impassivity. With climate change, is it the case that passivity is what is feared?

For the post-Cold War generation, the primary global threat comes not from action, but inaction. Last year, the American Association for the Advancement of Science warned that within a few decades, climate change will have “massively disruptive consequences to societies and ecosystems,” including widespread famines, lethal heat waves, more frequent and destructive natural disasters, and social unrest. Despite the litany of warnings like these, governments have utterly failed to take meaningful action.

At this point, climate change can be limited or accelerated, and humans can adapt to some degree, but significant damage to the planetary ecosystem can no longer be averted.

According to Washington, D.C.- based forensic psychiatrist Lise Van Susteren, the expectation of climate-change disasters is causing “pre-traumatic stress disorder.” In an interview with Esquire in July, she explains that the symptoms look much like those of post-traumatic stress disorder: “the anger, the panic, the obsessive, intrusive thoughts.”

Signs of pre-traumatic stress are increasingly evident among those who stare at the problem of climate change head-on: climate scientists, climate journalists and climate activists. The Esquire piece profiled a number of climate scientists and activists who experienced profound psychological trauma in the course of their work.

...

Paul Ehrlich is an ecologist at Stanford University and the coauthor of a recent paper arguing that a sixth mass extinction is already underway. He has put civilization’s chances of saving itself at about 10 percent—but he’s beginning to think that’s too optimistic. When asked by In These Times how he deals with the prospect of societal collapse, Ehrlich chuckles: “I drink a lot.”

Katie Herzog, an environmental journalist for Grist, says it’s “something easier to ignore if you don’t work in the business”—her friends are probably tired of hearing that “the planet is going to shit.” She’s “worried about the world that children will inherit,” and thinks it’s “irresponsible to have kids. I take solace that I’m not bringing life into the world that’s going to suffer.”

Slate’s climate reporter Eric Holthaus, a meteorologist by training, made waves when he publicly declared that he cried reading an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. “I go back and forth day-to-day between despair and optimism.” After much internal debate, he, unlike Herzog, did decide to have a child. “Before we had our baby it felt much easier to just give up,” he says. Now, “I feel an added pressure to keep trying.”

Those who pay close attention to climate change are deeply concerned for the next generation. And a significant portion of the next generation, it seems, is concerned for itself.

The young and the stressed

A 2007 poll of more than a thousand middle schoolers found that almost 60 percent feared climate change more than terrorism, car crashes or cancer. Roughly the same percentage thought more needed to be done to combat the threat, and more than 40 percent reported that concern about climate change occasionally occupies their minds.

“Unlike adults who can put their heads in the sand … kids are very aware of what’s going on,” said Chris Saade, a North Carolina-based psychotherapist, in a 2014 interview with The Globe and Mail. “Children often ask me questions that we, as adults, try to evade: ‘What is going to happen to the human race?’ ”

Most of the middle schoolers from 2007 are now in their early 20s. For a generation that was born after the Cold War and came of age in the Anthropocene, to what extent does climate fear persist into young adulthood?

In a June 2015 Pew poll, 51 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 rated climate change a “very serious” problem, compared to 47 percent of those 30 to 49, 44 percent of those 50 to 64, and 41 percent of those 65 and over. Fifty-one percent may seem a slim majority, but in light of what we know about human psychology, it’s actually quite striking. A 2009 report on climate-change psychology by the American Psychological Association explains that people tend to underestimate the danger of events perceived as having a “small probability.” Climate risks, which are believed by many to be uncertain, far off in the future, or occurring in remote parts of the planet, should follow this logic.

November 16, 2013

You should not worry that you are exposing theoretical fabrications while I am supposed to suffer the "real hardship". I value the strict limits, and the challenge. I am genuinely curious: how will I cope with this? And how can I turn this into a productive experience for me and my comrades? I find sources of inspiration; it contributes to my own development. Not because of, but in spite of the system. And in my struggle, your thoughts, ideas and stories are helpful to me.

I am happy to correspond with you. I await your reply and I wish you good luck in our common cause.

10 June 2013

Dear Nadezhda,

I felt deeply ashamed after reading your reply. You wrote: "You should not worry about the fact that you are exposing theoretical fabrications while I am supposed to suffer the 'real hardship'." This simple sentence made me aware that the final sentiment in my last letter was false: my expression of sympathy with your plight basically meant, "I have the privilege of doing real theory and teaching you about it while you are good for reporting on your experience of hardship …" Your last letter demonstrates that you are much more than that, that you are an equal partner in a theoretical dialogue. So my sincere apologies for this proof of how deeply entrenched is male chauvinism, especially when it is masked as sympathy for the other's suffering, and let me go on with our dialogue.

It is the crazy dynamics of global capitalism that make effective resistance to it so difficult and frustrating. Recall the great wave of protests that spilled all over Europe in 2011, from Greece and Spain to London and Paris. Even if there was no consistent political platform mobilising the protesters, the protests functioned as part of a large-scale educational process: the protesters' misery and discontent were transformed into a great collective act of mobilisation – hundreds of thousands gathered in public squares, proclaiming that they had enough, that things could not go on like that. However, what these protests add up to is a purely negative gesture of angry rejection and an equally abstract demand for justice, lacking the ability to translate this demand into a concrete political programme.

What can be done in such a situation, where demonstrations and protests are of no use, where democratic elections are of no use? Can we convince the tired and manipulated crowds that we are not only ready to undermine the existing order, to engage in provocative acts of resistance, but also to offer the prospect of a new order?

The Pussy Riot performances cannot be reduced just to subversive provocations. Beneath the dynamics of their acts, there is the inner stability of a firm ethico-political attitude. In some deeper sense, it is today's society that is caught in a crazy capitalist dynamic with no inner sense and measure, and it is Pussy Riot that de facto provides a stable ethico-political point. The very existence of Pussy Riot tells thousands that opportunist cynicism is not the only option, that we are not totally disoriented, that there still is a common cause worth fighting for.

July 25, 2013

Since Noam Chomsky’s “Fantasies” (Sunday, July 21, 2013, http://www.zcommunications.org/fantasies-by-noam-chomsky) present themselves as a reaction to my reply to his interview with a critical dismissal of my work, a brief clarification is needed. What Chomsky refers to as my ”reply” is a non-authorized and not accurate transcription of my answer to a question from the public during a recent debate at Birkbeck college in London. As it would be clear from a full transcription, at that moment I didn’t even know about Chomsky’s attack on me – I was just asked what do I think about his total dismissal of my work (together with that of Lacan and Derrida) as a case of fanciful posturing without any foundation in empirical facts and scientific reasoning, and I improvised a reaction on the spot. Chomsky’s remark that I “cite nothing” to justify my claim about his inaccuracies is thus ridiculous – how could I have done it in an improvised reply to an unexpected question? Probably to illustrate my disrespect for facts, Chomsky also dwells on the characterization of Obama that I wrongly attributed to him; there is no mystery about it, upon learning about my mistake, I unambiguously apologized – here is the text of my apology (from Harper’s magazine):

In attributing to Noam Chomsky the statement that Obama is a white guy who took some sun-tanning sessions, I repeated an untrue claim which appeared in Slovene media, so I can only offer my unreserved and unconditional apology.

I would like to add that, even if the statement I falsely attributed to Chomsky were to be truly made by him, I would not consider it a patronizingly racist slur, but a fully admissible characterization in our political and ideological struggle. There are African-American intellectuals who allow themselves to be fully co-opted into the white-liberal academic establishment, and they are loved by the establishment precisely because they seem “one of us,” white with a darkened skin. This is why, I think, the statement I falsely attributed to Chomsky does NOT amount to the same as Silvio Berlusconi’s misleadingly similar characterization of Obama as beautiful and well tanned: Berlusconi’s remark dismissed Obama’s blackness as an endearing eccentricity, thus obliterating the historical meaning of the fact that an African-American was elected President, while the remark I falsely attributed to Chomsky, if accurate, would point towards the ambiguous way Obama’s blackness can be instrumentalized to obfuscate our crucial political and economic struggles.”

I added the long second paragraph not to qualify my apology, but to make it clear that I never accused Chomsky of making a racist comment (as was Berlusconi’s quip). I find it a little bit mysterious why Chomsky dwells on this event which, if anything, proves my respect for empirical facts, i.e., my readiness to admit a mistake when I am empirically wrong! So is Chomsky ready to apologize when he reaches the lowest point of his attack in his claim that, in my reproaches to him concerning the way he deals with Khmer Rouge atrocities, I endorse the

“distinction betweenworthy and unworthy victims. The worthy victims are those whose fate can be attributed to some official enemy, the unworthy ones are the victims of our own state and its crimes. The two prime examples on which we focused were Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in the same years. /…/ to this day, those who are completely in the grip of western propaganda adhere religiously to the prescribed doctrine: a show of great indignation about the KR years and our accurate review of the information available, along with streams of falsification; and silence about the vastly more significant cases of ET and Cambodia under US attack, before and after the KR years. Žižek’s comments are a perfect illustration.”

All I can say is that I simply agree with these lines (with the exception of the last sentence, of course). Not only do I agree, but I was making the same point repeatedly, even mentioning East Timor, as in the following passage from my Welcome to the Desert of the Real:

»Why should the World Trade Center catastrophe be in any way privileged over, say, the mass slaughter of Hutus by Tutsis in Ruanda in 1999? Or the mass bombing and gas-poisoning of Kurds in the north of Iraq in the early 1990s? Or the Indonesian forces' mass killings in East Timor? Or...«

The claim that I in any way endorse the »distinction betweenworthy and unworthy victims” is thus patently wrong. I only have to add that I see an important difference between Cambodia and East Timor. In the latter case, we were dealing with a foreign military intervention and occupation (Indonesia with the US support) whose aim was simply to colonize and exploit the occupied country, while in the case of Cambodia, violence was perpetrated by a politico-military organization of Cambodian people themselves mobilized by a well-articulated radical Millenarian vision (to erase the ideological past and build a New Man, inclusive of closing all schools, liquidating intellectuals, prohibiting all religions, and undermining family ties). Furthermore, one should also bear in mind that the US attitude towards Khmer Rouge cannot be reduced to a demonizing condemnation: to counter the increased Soviet influence after the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge regime by the Vietnamese intervention in 1979, the US and China together supported the Khmer Rouge regime as the sole legitimate representative of Cambodia in the UN – all of a sudden, Khmer Rouge were not so totally bad… But this seems to me also a relatively minor point. What brings us to the heart of the matter is Chomsky’s accusation that I rudely misrepresent his position: according to me, he (Chomsky) claims

“that ‘we don’t need any critique of ideology’ – that is, we don’t need what I’ve devoted enormous efforts to for many years. His evidence? He heard that from some people who talked to me. Sheer fantasy again, but another indication of his concept of empirical fact and rational discussion.”

For me, on the contrary, the problem is here a very rational one: everything hinges on how we define “ideology.” If one defines and uses this term the way I do (and I am not alone here: my understanding echoes a long tradition of so-called Western Marxism), then one has to conclude that what Chomsky is doing in his political writings is very important, I have great admiration and respect for it, but it is emphatically not critique of ideology. Let me indicate what I mean by this. What I had in mind when I spoke about his stance towards Khmer Rouge was, among other passages, the following lines from Chomsky’s and Herman’s “Distortions at Fourth Hand« from The Nation (June 6, 1977):

»Space limitations preclude a comprehensive review, but such journals as the Far Eastern Economic Review, the London Economist, the Melbourne Journal of Politics, and others elsewhere, have provided analyses by highly qualified specialists who have studied the full range of evidence available, and who concluded that executions have numbered at most in the thousands; that these were localized in areas of limited Khmer Rouge influence and unusual peasant discontent, where brutal revenge killings were aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from the American destruction and killing. These reports also emphasize both the extraordinary brutality on both sides during the civil war (provoked by the American attack) and repeated discoveries that massacre reports were false. /.../ To give an illustration of just one neglected source, the London Economist (March 26, 1977) carried a letter by W.J. Sampson, who worked as an economist and statistician for the Cambodian Government until March 1975, in close contact with the central statistics office. After leaving Cambodia, he writes, he 'visited refugee camps in Thailand and kept in touch with Khmers,' and he also relied on 'A European friend who cycled around Phnom Penh for many days after its fall [and] saw and heard of no ... executions' apart from 'the shooting of some prominent politicians and the lynching of hated bomber pilots in Phnom Penh.' He concludes 'that executions could be numbered in hundreds or thousands rather than in hundreds of thousands,' though there was 'a big death toll from sickness' - surely a direct consequence, in large measure, of the devastation caused by the American attack. /.../ If, indeed, postwar Cambodia is, as /Lacouture/ believes, similar to Nazi Germany, then his comment is perhaps just, though we may add that he has produced no evidence to support this judgement. But if postwar Cambodia is more similar to France after liberation, where many thousands of people were massacred within a few months under far less rigorous conditions than those left by the American war, then perhaps a rather different judgement is in order. That the latter conclusion may be more nearly correct is suggested by the analyses mentioned earlier.

/.../ We do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting assessments; rather, we again want to emphasize some crucial points. What filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasizing alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial U.S. role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered. Evidence that focuses on the American role /.../ is ignored, not on the basis of truthfulness or scholarship but because the message is unpalatable.«

I think the quoted passage confirms that my improvised resume of Chomsky's position about Khmer Rouge atrocities (»No, this is Western propaganda. Khmer Rouge are not as horrible as that.”) is a correct one. I do not agree in any way with those who accuse Chomsky of sympathizing with Khmer Rouge, although I find the parallel between Cambodia after the KR takeover and France liberated in 1944 very problematic. Did de Gaulle after the liberation of Paris order its complete evacuation? Did his government reorganize entire social life into collective communes run by military commanders? Did it close down schools? If anything, de Gaulle's first government was way too tolerant, (among other problematic measures) admitting legal continuity between the Vichy years and the new republic, so that all laws enforced by the Vichy regime (and they were numerous!) remained valid if they were not explicitly revoked. But apart from this particular point, I have some further problems with Chomsky’s and Herman’s old text.

I agree that one should approach reports on humanitarian crises or genocidal violence in Western media with a great measure of skepticism: they are as a rule heavily biased due to political and economic interests. However, although Chomsky claims he doesn’t pretend to know what actually went on in Cambodia, the bias of his own description is obvious: his sympathies lies with those who try to minimize and relativize Khmer Rouge atrocities. This bias is ideology - a set of explicit and implicit, even unspoken, ethico-political and other positions, decision, choices, etc., which predetermine our perception of facts, what we tend to emphasize or to ignore, how we organize facts into a consistent whole of a narrative or a theory. And it is this bias which displays Chomsky’s ideology in selecting and ordering data, what he downplays and what he emphasizes, not only in the case of Cambodia but also in the case of post-Yugoslav war (his downplaying of the Srebrenica massacre), etc. To avoid a misunderstanding, I am not advocating here the “postmodern” idea that our theories are just stories we are telling each other, stories which cannot be grounded in facts; I am also not advocating a purely neutral unbiased view. My point is that the plurality of stories and biases is itself grounded in our real struggles. With regard to Chomsky, I claim that his bias sometimes leads him to selections of facts and conclusions which obfuscate the complex reality he is trying to analyze.

Today we know that the accusations against the KR regime were mainly true. Chomsky’s answer would probably have been that such heavy accusations have to be grounded in precise empirical facts, and that in the case of Cambodia back in the late 1970s such facts were sorely missing. While there is some truth in this claim (especially with regard to the devastation caused earlier in Cambodia by the US Army), I have again some problems with it. There is a thin line that separates justified doubt about media reports from comfortable skepticism which allows us to ignore or downplay atrocities. One can easily imagine a similar line of argumentation in the late 1930s about the Nazi atrocities or the Stalinist purges: we don’t have enough reliable data, we should not pretend to know what really goes on in these countries, so it is advisable to doubt Western press reports… (and in both these cases, as well as in the case of Khmer Rouge, later knowledge confirmed the worst fears). One may add that a similar tactic is used by companies and organizations which want to downplay the environmental or health risks (we don’t really know for certain about global warming, about the health risks of smoking…). So how can to decide in such cases? It is here that the analysis of ideology can be of some help – the point I made in my improvised reply to Chomsky:

»For example, concerning Stalinism. The point is not that you have to know, you have photo evidence of gulag or whatever. My God you just have to listen to the public discourse of Stalinism, of Khmer Rouge, to get it that something terrifyingly pathological is going on there. For example, Khmer Rouge: Even if we have no data about their prisons and so on, isn’t it in a perverse way almost fascinating to have a regime which in the first two years (’75 to ’77) behaved towards itself, treated itself, as illegal? You know the regime was nameless. It was called “Angka,” organization — not Communist Party of Cambodia — an organization. Leaders were nameless.”

My underlying thesis is here that no effective ideology simply lies: an ideology is never a simple mystification obfuscating the hidden reality of domination and exploitation; the atrocious reality obfuscated and mystified by an ideology has to register, to leave traces, in the explicit ideological text itself, in the guise of its inconsistencies, gaps, etc. The Stalinist show trials were, of course, a brutal travesty of justice concealing breath-taking brutality, but to see this, it is not necessary to know the reality behind them – the public face of the trials, the puppet-like monstrosity of public confessions, etc., made this abundantly clear. In a homologous way, one doesn’t have to know how Jews really were to guess that the Nazi accusations against them were a fake - a close look at these accusations makes it clear that we are dealing with paranoiac fantasies.

The same goes for liberal-capitalist violence, of course – I have written many pages on the falsity of humanitarian interventionism. One does not need to know the brutal reality that sustains such interventions, the cynical pursuit of economic and political interests obfuscated by humanitarian concerns, to discern the falsity of such interventionism – the inconsistencies, gaps and silences of its explicit text are tell-tale enough. This, of course, in no way implies that the disclosure and analysis of facts are not important: one should bring out to light all the details of their atrocious brutality, of ruthless economic exploitation, etc. - a job done quite well by Chomsky himself. However, in order to explain how people often remain within their ideology even when they are forced to admit facts, one has to supplement investigation and disclosure of facts by the analysis of ideology which not only makes people blind for the full horror of facts but also enables them to participate in activities which generates these atrocious facts while maintaining the appearance of human dignity.

There is another refined point to be made here. Often, one cannot but be shocked by the excessive indifference towards suffering, even and especially when this suffering is widely reported in the media and condemned, as if it is the very outrage at suffering which turns us into its immobilized fascinated spectators. Recall, in the early 1990s, the three-years-long siege of Sarajevo, with the population starving, exposed to permanent shelling and snipers’ fire. The big enigma here is: although all the media were full of pictures and reports, why did not the UN forces, NATO, or the US accomplish just a small act of breaking the siege of Sarajevo, of imposing a corridor through which people and provisions could circulate freely? It would have cost nothing: with a little bit of serious pressure on the Serb forces, the prolonged spectacle of encircled Sarajevo exposed to daily dose of terror would have been over. There is only one answer to this enigma, the one proposed by Rony Brauman who, on behalf of the Red Cross, coordinated the help to Sarajevo: the very presentation of the crisis of Sarajevo as “humanitarian,” the very recasting of the political-military conflict into humanitarian terms, was sustained by an eminently political choice (basically, taking the Serb side in the conflict). Especially ominous and manipulative was here the role of Francois Mitterand:

“The celebration of ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Yugoslavia took the place of a political discourse, disqualifying in advance all conflicting debate. /…/ It was apparently not possible, for Francois Mitterand, to express his analysis of the war in Yugoslavia. With the strictly humanitarian response, he discovered an unexpected source of communication or, more precisely, of cosmetics, which is a little bit the same thing. /…/ Mitterand remained in favor of the maintenance of Yugoslavia within its borders and was persuaded that only a strong Serbian power was in the position to guarantee a certain stability in this explosive region. This position rapidly became unacceptable in the eyes of the French people. All the bustling activity and the humanitarian discourse permitted him to reaffirm the unfailing commitment of France to the Rights of Man in the end, and to mimic an opposition to Greater Serbian fascism, all in giving it free rein.”

One can see how my perception of the Yugoslav conflict differs from Chomsky’s. However, I agree with the general thrust of his argument which is that one should analyze the depoliticized humanitarian politics of “Human Rights” as the ideology of military interventionism serving specific economico-political purposes. As Wendy Brown develops apropos Michael Ignatieff, such humanitarianism

“presents itself as something of an antipolitics – a pure defense of the innocent and the powerless against power, a pure defense of the individual against immense and potentially cruel or despotic machineries of culture, state, war, ethnic conflict, tribalism, patriarchy, and other mobilizations or instantiations of collective power against individuals.”

However, the question is: “what kind of politicization /those who intervene on behalf of human rights/ set in motion against the powers they oppose. Do they stand for a different formulation of justice or do they stand in opposition to collective justice projects?” Say, it is clear that the US overthrowing of Saddam Hussein, legitimized in the terms of ending the suffering of the Iraqi people, not only was motivated by precise politico-economic interests, but also relied on a precise idea of the political and economic conditions of the post-Saddam Iraq (Western liberal democracy, guarantee of private property, the inclusion into the global market, etc.). The purely humanitarian anti-political politics of merely preventing suffering thus effectively amounts to the implicit prohibition of elaborating a positive collective project of socio-political transformation. Jacques Ranciere proposes here a salient comparison of human rights with charity donations:

“/…/ when they are of no use, you do the same as charitable persons do with their old clothes. You give them to the poor. Those rights that appear to be useless in their place are sent abroad, along with medicine and clothes, to people deprived of medicine, clothes, and rights. /…/ if those who suffer inhuman repression are unable to enact Human Rights that are their last recourse, then somebody else has to inherit their rights in order to enact them in their place. This is what is called the ‘right to humanitarian interference’ – a right that some nations assume to the supposed benefit of victimized populations, and very often against the advice of the humanitarian organizations themselves.”

Consequently, what today, in the predominant Western public speech, the “Human Rights of the Third World suffering victims” effectively mean is the right of the Western powers themselves to intervene – politically, economically, culturally, militarily - in the Third World countries of their choice on behalf of the defense of Human Rights. My disagreement with Chomsky’s political analyses lies elsewhere: his neglect of how ideology works, as well as the problematic nature of his biased dealing with facts which often leads him to do what he accuses his opponents of doing.

But I think that that the differences in our political positions are so minimal that they cannot really account for the thoroughly dismissive tone of Chomsky’s attack on me. Our conflict is really about something else – it is simply a new chapter in the endless gigantomachy between so-called continental philosophy and the Anglo-Saxon empiricist tradition. There is nothing specific in Chomsky’s critique – the same accusations of irrationality, of empty posturing, of playing with fancy words, were heard hundreds of times against Hegel, against Heidegger, against Derrida, etc. What stands out is only the blind brutality of his dismissal – here is how he replies when, back in his December 2012 interview with Veterans Unplugged, he was asked about the ideas of Lacan, Derrida, and me:

“What you’re referring to is what’s called ‘theory.’ And when I said I’m not interested in theory, what I meant is, I’m not interested in posturing – using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever. So there’s no theory in any of this stuff, not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find in all of the work you mentioned some principles from which you can deduce conclusions, empirically testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old. See if you can find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can’t. So I’m not interested in that kind of posturing. Žižek is an extreme example of it. I don’t see anything to what he’s saying.”

And he goes on and on in the same vein, repeating how he doesn’t see anything to what I’m saying, how he cannot discern in my texts any traces of rational examination of facts, how my work displays empty posturing not to be taken seriously, etc. A weird statement, measured by his professed standards of respect for empirical facts and rational argumentation: there are no citations (which, in this case, can be excused, since we are dealing with a radio interview), but also not even the vaguest mentions of any of my ideas. Did he decode any of my “fancy words” and indicate how what one gets is “something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old”? There are no political references in his first attack (and in this domain, as far as I can see, I much more often than not agree with him). I did a couple of short political books on 9/11 (Welcome to the Desert of the Real), on the war in Iraq (Iraq: the Borrowed Kettle), on the 2008 financial meltdown (First as Tragedy, then as Farce), which appear to me written in a quite accessible way and dealing with quite a lot of facts – do they also contain nothing but empty posturing? In short, is Chomsky in his thorough dismissal of my work not doing exactly what he is accusing me of: clinging to the empty posture of total rejection with no further ad?

I think one can convincingly show that the continental tradition in philosophy, although often difficult to decode, and sometimes – I am the first to admit this - defiled by fancy jargon, remains in its core a mode of thinking which has its own rationality, inclusive of respect for empirical data. And I furthermore think that, in order to grasp the difficult predicament we are in today, to get an adequate cognitive mapping of our situation, one should not shirk the resorts of the continental tradition in all its guises, from the Hegelian dialectics to the French “deconstruction.” Chomsky obviously doesn’t agree with me here. So what if – just another fancy idea of mine – what if Chomsky cannot find anything in my work that goes “beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old because” because, when he deals with continental thought, it is his mind which functions as the mind of a twelve-years-old, the mind which is unable to distinguish serious philosophical reflection from empty posturing and playing with empty words?

January 12, 2013

Zizek provides one of the most compelling arguments why the party is not outmoded, why we have not entered a political time that has surpassed the need for a party, and why the party is not a form confined to the limits it encountered in a prior sequence. The most succinct way to put the argument is the "proletarian struggles with a foreign kernel." Another way to make the same point is to say that the proletariat is not self-identical; it is split. Or, the proletariat doesn't know what it desires; it confronts its own desire as something foreign or mysterious.

What are the implications of this idea for thinking about the potential of a party for us? I begin by looking at how Zizek approaches his discussion, namely, via Lenin's paraphrase--and revision--of Kautsky with respect to the idea that the working class needs non-working class intellectuals to bring knowledge to them. This idea has been widely criticized, viewed as elitist or as a failure to trust the workers. Zizek emphasizes that Lenin and Kautsky are not the same here: where Kautsky says that intellectuals are external to the class struggle, Lenin says they are external to the economic struggle, which means they are still within the class stuggle. So, the first thing to note is that the perspective of the party is one that is not external to class struggle but embedded within it.

Nonetheless, there is an externality here, an externality to the economic struggle. This is important insofar as without this external perspective, the working class remains subordinate to bourgeois ideology. Its spontaneous development can go no further. The perspective of the party, then, is one that situates the economic struggle within the larger class struggle. It makes the economic struggle appear not as a matter for these workers in this factory but as part of a larger, more fundamental conflict, the antagonism constitutive of capitalist society.

Another way to express the same point is to note that the working class is a bourgeois subject. It is constrained within a field or discourse configured by and for the bourgeoisie; it gets its position from within this field. So it might refuse and resist, sabotage and strike, but all these actions are still confined within a field given by the bourgeoisie, configured for its interests, in its behalf. To be another kind of subject, the subject of another field, discourse, politics (sequence?), to be proletarian, requires a break or twist, a shift to another field, the field of the Party.

Badiou has something like this in mind in Theory of the Subject when he notes the internal split in the working class between its 'true political identity' and 'its latent corruption by bourgeois or imperialist ideas and practices' (8). He writes: "the practical (historical) working class is always the contradictory unity of itself as proletariat and of it specific bourgeois inversion ... This unity of opposites is determined .. by the general bourgeois space" (9). And, "the bourgeoisie makes a subject" (42); "the subjective effect of their force lies in the divided people" (42).

Zizek writes: "'external' intellectuals are needed because the working class cannot immediately perceive its own place within the social totality, which enables it to accomplish its 'mission'--this insight has to be mediated through an external element." This external element is the Party.

The Party is not identical to the 'external intellectuals.' As we know from "What is to be Done?" Lenin assumed that the membership of the Party would come from intellectuals and workers, in fact, that those categories blurred and intermingled; they were not fixed and firm as some kind of split between mental and physical labor. The Party, then, cannot be localized onto a specific, empirical set of people. In fact, because it is not reducible to a number of given people, it cannot be said to 'substitute' these people for the workers, proletariat, or masses. To assume so is to make a kind of category mistake.

The Party "gives form" to the external element, to the setting in which the workers are situated but which remains opaque to them with respect to their own position in it. It does this in several senses.

First, the Party occupies the position of the proletariat's own decenteredness. It takes that place; it inserts itself there. Zizek writes: "it is not possible for the working class to actualize its historical mission spontaneously--the Party must intervene from the outside, shaking it out of the self-indulgent spontaneity." He continues, "in psychoanalysis there is no self-analysis proper; analysis is possible only if a foreign kernel gives body to the object-cause of the subject's desire."

[Unfortunately for me as I typed this I realized that psychoanalysis is in fact rooted in Freud's self-analysis. My best guess is that the way out of this would be to focus on Freud's dream analysis and his writing, understanding these as practices of externalization and working through that ultimately were taken up in letters to and discussions with others.]

I understand the analogy between working class and analysand/Party and analyst as relying on the insight that we do not know our own desire; desire remains opaque to us; it is unconscious, manifest in our actions, our practices, in various symptoms or distortions, but not something we know. Nor is it something we choose--rather, we are who we are because, in a way, desire has chosen us; we are who are because of the desire that makes us. It is in us more than ourselves, a constitutively foreign, even alienating kernel. [I add alienating here as a step toward rejecting a politics rooted in a critique of alienation; alienation is constitutive and unavoidable.]

The argument for the split nature of the working class is important as a response to those who would posit in workers a clear knowledge of what they want and who would link this knowledge to politics. Put in old fashioned Leninist terms, this can only take us as far as trade union consciousness. It remains within the economic struggle rather than the class struggle.

Second, the Party gives form to a new kind of knowledge, knowledge rooted not in some determinate content but linked "to a collective political subject." The Party doesn't know everything; it provides a position from which to know. We could say that it opens up another field, another discourse. The Party holds this field in place, providing the working class within a new place, the place of the proletariat.

From within the economic struggle, only the opposition between worker and bourgeoisie was possible. The external element of the Party opens out another field, one in which the proletariat is its subject. Zizek writes,

"What the Party demands is that we agree to ground our 'I' in the "we" of the Party's collective identity: fight with us, fight for us, fight for your truth against the Party line--just don't do it alone, outside the Party. Exactly as in Lacan's formula of the discourse of the analyst, what is important about the Party's knowledge is not its content, but the fact that it occupies the place of Truth."

So, with respect to knowledge, the Party is not necessary because of its knowledge of history, of struggles, or of anything. It's necessary because its knowing stems from class struggle. The Party speaks from the position of the truth of class struggle as the fundamental antagonism. To say that the position of the Party is true is to designate the position from which the Party speaks, the fact that it holds in place a field or discourse or set of meanings.

[A filled out account of the Party as analogous to the analyst would note that the subject is in the position of addressee and that the master is remaindered. This suggests a formal way of describing the perhaps some of the resistance felt towards the Party and its demands, its requirements and its discipline that we know may be wrong or arbitrary and may very well result in failure insofar as the Party cannot guarantee its own political success; again, the Master is remaindered.]

Third, by giving form to the divided working class (the class within the field of the bourgeoisie), the Party occupies the place of its division and establishes the field for a new subject, the proletariat (or, in my jargon, the people as the rest of us, the people understood in terms of the primacy of division). With respect to the analogy with the analyst, this does not mean that the Party knows the secret of the working class (and thereby turns it into the proletariat). Nor does it mean that the Party cures the working of its bourgeois tendencies, and thereby subjectifies it. Rather, the Party holds open the place necessary for this subjectification.

If we think of analysis as providing the space within which the analysand can concentrate his or her feelings, fantasies, and experiences, then we can think of action in relation to, in the context of, the Party as an analogous kind of concentration. Badiou is appropriate here when he condemns the idea of 'convergence of struggles.'

You may 'coordinate' them as much as you like, but a sum of revolts does not make a subject. The geometric character of 'convergence' must be replaced with the qualitative character of concentration . . . Convergence is the typical objectivist deviation, in which, once the work of subjective purification is spirited away, antagonism finds itself ill-advisedly dissolved (44).

To sum up, the Party is necessary because the people are split. They are split between the way they are given, positioned, within capitalism. They are situated within a field that tells them who they are and what they can be, that establishes the matrix of their desire (Zizek's definition of ideology), but that represses the truth of this field in class struggle. The Party asserts this truth, it speaks from the position of this truth and offers another field of possibilities, a discourse for another subject. In contrast, opposition to, capitalist desire, it opens up a terrain for the desire of another subject, a collective, political subject.

At this point, I have basically repeated points I've already made in Zizek's Politics and The Communist Horizon. Why bother? Because at least one element of the analogy between the party and the analyst remains unexplored, the status of each as a transferential object. This is what I want to explore next--the party as a transferential object. What does this mean and what does it accomplish? My intuition is that this is a crucial matter for a defense of the party. Accounts of small, open, and fluctuating groups and associations generally ignore transference. That is, they proceed flatly, as if associations were nothing but assemblages of people working together (with varying degrees of conflict). The unconscious component of association is ignored. I'll take this up in subsequent posts.

August 07, 2012

Pussy Riot members accused of blasphemy and hatred of religion? The answer is easy: the true blasphemy is the state accusation itself, formulating as a crime of religious hatred something which was clearly a political act of protest against the ruling clique. Recall Brecht’s old quip from his Beggars’ Opera: “What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?” In 2008, Wall Street gave us the new version: what is the stealing of a couple of thousand of dollars, for which one goes to prison, compared to financial speculations that deprive tens of millions of their homes and savings, and are then rewarded by state help of sublime grandeur? Now, we got another version from Russia, from the power of the state: What is a modest Pussy Riot obscene provocation in a church compared to the accusation against Pussy Riot, this gigantic obscene provocation of the state apparatus which mocks any notion of decent law and order?

Was the act of Pussy Riot cynical? There are two kinds of cynicism: the bitter cynicism of the oppressed which unmasks the hypocrisy of those in power, and the cynicism of the oppressors themselves who openly violate their own proclaimed principles. The cynicism of Pussy Riot is of the first kind, while the cynicism of those in power – why not call their authoritarian brutality a Prick Riot - is of the much more ominous second kind.

Back in 1905, Leon Trotsky characterized tsarist Russia as “a vicious combination of the Asian knout and the European stock market.” Does this designation not hold more and more also for the Russia of today? Does it not announce the rise of the new phase of capitalism, capitalism with Asian values (which, of course, has nothing to do with Asia and everything to do with the anti-democratic tendencies in today's global capitalism).

If we understand cynicism as ruthless pragmatism of power which secretly laughs at its own principles, then Pussy Riot are anti-cynicism embodied. Their message is: IDEAS MATTER. They are conceptual artists in the noblest sense of the word: artists who embody an Idea. This is why they wear balaclavas: masks of de-individualization, of liberating anonymity. The message of their balaclavas is that it doesn't matter which of them got arrested – they're not individuals, they're an Idea. And this is why they are such a threat: it is easy to imprison individuals, but try to imprison an Idea!

The panic of those in power – displayed by their ridiculously excessive brutal reaction - is thus fully justified. The more brutally they act, the more important symbol Pussy Riot will become. Already now the result of the oppressive measures is that Pussy Riot are a household name literally all around the world. It is the sacred duty of all of us to prevent that the courageous individuals who compose Pussy Riot will not pay in their flesh the price for their becoming a global symbol.